In the volume of the official history of ASIO that deals with what Greg Langley has described as the ‘decade of dissent’, 1965 to 1975,[1] there is one mention of the women’s liberation movement and ASIO’s surveillance of it. In his volume, John Blaxland lists the women’s liberation movement as just one of the social movements that was monitored by ASIO during the late 1960s and early 1970s, alongside the peace movement, and the movement for Aboriginal rights.[2] Blaxland does not go beyond this mention, but we know from other autobiographical works on the material history of ASIO, such as Anne Summers’ chapter in the Meredith Burgmann’s Dirty Secrets anthology,[3] that the security services did extensively monitor feminists and the women’s liberation movement during this period.

Unlike the National Archives in London, the National Archives of Australia have been very forthcoming in releasing ASIO files from the 1960s through to the early 1980s, particularly due to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by people who were subject to ASIO surveillance, as well as by a small number of interested journalists and academics. Although, as Tim Sherratt has written,[4] the publicly available ASIO files often have the most controversial elements still redacted, while more sensitive files are retained by the government. Still the amount of material that has been released has been highly useful for contemporary historians.

Most of the publicly available ASIO files on the women’s liberation movement have been digitised and cover the period from 1970 to 1980. As well as four national files (which are the papers that I have explored), there are a number of files dedicated the movements in New South Wales (9), Victoria (4) and the Australian Capital Territory (2). There are probably more files dedicated to the movements in the other states and territories, but some files on South Australia and Tasmania are incorporated into the national files.

ASIO were not the only branch of the state to be involved in the monitoring of the women’s liberation movement. The Special Branches of each state police force were involved in the surveillance of feminist activists across Australia, with Margaret Henderson and Alexandra Winter revealing the in-depth monitoring of socialist feminist Carole Ferrier by the Queensland Special Branch between 1975 and 1989.[5] The Special Branch files in most states have been destroyed (or are deemed not locatable),[6] with only glimpses of the work of these Special Branches being seen in their correspondence with ASIO maintained in the released ASIO files (one exception to this being the papers of the South Australian Special Branch made public during the inquiry by Justice White into the Special Branch’s security records in 1977).[7]

As Henderson and Winter, as well as Jon Piccini,[8] have noted in their research into ASIO and Special Branch files, while these files give us a detailed record of events, they also present a narrative of activism as determined by the surveiller and not by the subject of the surveillance. Their actions are deemed noteworthy if they fit in with ‘paranoid’ outlook of the security services, who were trained to see potential threats from a multitude of otherwise innocuous sources. As much as we see the behaviour of the activist in these files, we also see the thinking underpinning the actions of the state, who were much more readily to believe that many independent actors were part of a wider conspiracy against the established political and social order in Australia at the time.

The ASIO files on the women’s liberation movement assembled at the national level begin in early 1970. This provides evidence of three main motivations for surveillance of the movement. Firstly, the file contains plenty of clippings on the women’s liberation movement in the United States and their radicalism, and, as Ruth Rosen has shown, the FBI showed great interest in these feminist activists for a variety of reasons. This suspicion was transferred from the US to Australia, as Australian women started to read Kate Millet, Betty Friedan and other US feminist writers. Secondly, the files also note the beginning of various Women’s Liberation Groups formed in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra in 1969-70, who are in communication with each other and looking to organise on a national scale, with the Sydney group coming first and then others taking inspiration in the other cities. Thirdly, ASIO were already heavily monitoring the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the Trotskyist Socialist Youth Alliance (SYA) and it is from these two groups that many of the more militant socialist feminists emerged.

CPA feminist Olga Silver selling ‘Tribune’

Both the CPA and SYA were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the wider cultural radicalism of the era and tried to organise around the issue of women’s liberation, both within their party structures and within broader activist circles. In the fourteen years since 1956, the CPA had undergone a significant change from a very pro-Stalin and pro-Chinese militant party to a proto-Eurocommunist party that sought to embrace the new social movements that arose in the 1960s. As Margaret Penson has shown, under the new leadership of Laurie Aarons, the CPA started to take the idea of women’s liberation seriously and several women party members were involved in organising around the issue, with a national conference on women held by the CPA in 1970.[9] At the same time, those within the Party who eschewed these social movements (and held a more pro-Soviet viewpoint) started to agitate against the Aarons leadership and eventually broke away in 1971 to become the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA).

The SYA were a Trotskyist group that emerged out of the anti-war movement at Sydney University, influenced by the US Socialist Workers Party and the Mandelite Fourth International, including the British International Marxist Group. Critical of the Communist Party’s ‘Stalinism’, the SYA emphasised its anti-imperial solidarity work, including the establishment of the Third World Bookshop in Sydney, which became an organisational hub for the SYA (but also bugged by ASIO).

A 1971 report on the Women’s Liberation Trade Union Conference, organised by the CPA’s Aileen Beaver, explicitly outlined the ASIO’s interest in the women’s liberation movement in Australia:

Over the past months the Women’s Liberation Movement has been gaining increasing support… and many of the Groups appear to be dominated by Communist Party of Australia (CPAS) members, eg, the Working Women’s Women’s Liberation Group in Sydney or by Maoists eg, the Worker Student Alliance Women’s Liberation Group in Melbourne or by Trotskyists eg, Sydney Bread and Roses Women’s Liberation Group. It is for this reason that ASIO is maintaining an interest in the Women’s Liberation Movement. (my emphasis)[10]

Much of ASIO’s surveillance of the women’s liberation movement came from its surveillance of the Communist Party and the Socialist Youth Alliance, through the bugging of the CPA and SYA offices, and reports by agents at meetings and conferences. As David Lockwood has noted, these ASIO files often observed the mundane every-day activities of those involved in progressive and left-wing politics. Page after page is filled with short memos outlining particular people of interest, their links to other people and organisations under surveillance and often with a short description of the person. With the case of feminist activists, these candid remarks by ASIO agents reveal the sexist contempt that they had for the women’s liberation movement at the time. For example, a memo on Isabelle Sandford (also known as ‘Coonie’) stated:

Coonie is approximately 23 years of age, approximately 5’2” tall, with shoulder length straight dark brown hair. She has brown eyes, weights approximately 8 stone. She has a good figure, is neat and well groomed. She is not popular with the other members of the Women’s Liberation Group as they consider she talks a lot of rot, and has in fact been accused on occasions of being a liar.[11]

Another memo on Elisabeth Elliott seemed to complain that while she was considered ‘a very attractive girl’, she was deemed to be ‘untidy in her general appearance’.[12]

The CPA had overseen the establishment of the Union of Australian Women (UAW) in the 1950s, but by the early 1970s, it was being taken over by the Women’s Liberation Groups which involved both CPA and SYA members. One report from November 1970 noted ‘a lot of bickering’ at a South District branch meeting over whether the UAW was still the ‘main CPA women’s organisation’,[13] with dissidents (who would eventually form the SPA) allegedly pressing for the traditional organisation to maintain its role. In March 1971, ASIO further noted that future SPA leading figure Pat Clancy:

spoke disparagingly of the CPA leadership’s attitude of concentrating on Women’s Liberation as he feels that the potential of Women’s Liberation is minor compared to the possibility of organising women in the industrial area.[14]

The CPA maintained its support for women’s liberation movement and published a pamphlet in 1971 titled, What Every Woman Should Know, under the guise of the Women’s Liberation Working Women’s Group. An ASIO intercept report noted that the CPA sold out its initial run of the pamphlet and that hundreds of copies were to be sent to CPA bookshops in Melbourne and Perth.[15] In July 1972, ASIO still saw the CPA as ‘the best appointed Women’s Liberation’ group, but noted that ‘even within it there is quite strong opposition from many of the men’.[16] An agent’s briefing from 1972 National Congress of the CPA noted that one male Communist Party member spoke out against women’s liberation at the Congress, reporting:

He was very much against the part of Women’s Liberation where they were men hating. He felt that this was a bad attitude which could do nothing but harm to the organisation.[17]

As Steve James has written, the primary function of ASIO was intelligence gathering,[18] but one wonders about what use the information gathered by ASIO agents would be. For example, after a Women’s Liberation Conference held in Guthega in NSW in January 1972 by a faction within the SYA, a brief called for the following from any agents or informants attending the conference:

Identification of persons attending the Conference with particular reference to their political leanings…

Information concerning the reported split within the Socialist Youth Alliance over the issues of Women’s Liberation.

Information concerning a possible split in the Women’s Liberation Movement in Sydney following the formation of the New Communist Party (Socialist Party of Australia).[19]

The first three national files are dedicated to the years from 1970 to 1972, but the last file covers the years from 1972 to 1980, suggesting a reduction in interest from ASIO, particularly in relation to the links between the Communist Party and the Socialist Youth Alliance to the women’s liberation movement, which was, as quoted above, the main reason for ASIO’s surveillance of the movement. This neatly coincides with the election of the Whitlam government in December 1972 and the reform of ASIO after the raid ordered by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy in early 1973.

However surveillance did not stop entirely in this period and it seems that ASIO seemed to shift their focus of concern from the women’s liberation movement being a political concern with regards to Communist and Trotskyist entrism to a concern about the impact that the movement was having socially and culturally. One document drafted in November 1972, just before the election of Whitlam, argued explicitly that the women’s liberation movement was ‘a subversive movement… in a unique manner.’[20] Firstly, the report acknowledged, as had been ASIO thinking over the last few years, that the women’s liberation movement was ‘a target movement… for communist action organisations.’[21] The report expanded on this, stating:

This feature of Women’s Liberation, by itself, would make Women’s Liberation of security interest as the expressed aim of the communists is to capture, control, exploit every critical, reformist movement or organisation and develop it into a new revolutionary context.[22]

But this communist infiltration was not the only concern of ASIO. The same report purported:

Women’s Liberation… is not directly concerned with political subversion but is concerned with subversion on a higher and more sophisticated level, (that is social subversion, into which political subversion is incorporated).[23]

This suggested that certain people within the security services believed that the women’s liberation movement were actively undermining the moral fabric of Australian society in the 1970s. The report outlined at length the ways in which this moral subversion alleged manifested itself, including through the degradation of the education system, reconfiguration of sex values and conduct, promotion of drug use, rejection of traditional social values, and undermining of traditional understandings of ‘democracy’.

ASIO outlines the ‘subversive’ agenda of the WLM in Australia (1972)

‘Because of its relentless critique of the existing social order, and the unique nature of its critique,’ ASIO stated, the women’s liberation movement was ‘a fertile field for communist activity’.[24] The report continued…

Women’s Liberation is engaged in the same process of dismantling existing institutions that the communists engage in AFTER the revolution (and, of course, continuously attempt). The communists are delighted to have a ‘captive audience’ which can be mobilised against the capitalist system…

From the Women’s Liberation social analysis, then, it is a short step to the communist analysis of political and social power in capitalist societies.[25]

However as the 1970s progressed, the focus of ASIO on communist entrism in the Women’s Liberation Movement shifted to other parties than the CPA and the SYA (which had become Socialist Workers League after 1972). Between 1972 and 1975, ASIO noted the increased interest in the Women’s Liberation Movement from the Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). The aforementioned report from November 1972 noted that the CPA(M-L) held the line that women should organise inside the Communist Party as ‘Marxism-Leninism is the only correct theory on this question.’[26] Two memos from 1975 reveal that some within the SPA, who were originally sceptical of the Women’s Liberation Movement’, argued that the Party ‘must associate with groups such as Women’s Liberation and the Women’s Electoral Lobby because in these groups is where the progressive people are.’[27] Geoff Curthoys was quoted as saying that ‘the S.P.A. must not sever connections with these groups’.[28] Freda Brown reportedly agreed with Curthoys, but stated that ‘the S.P.A. has not got the women’s forces’ to work with these groups.[29]

By 1980, the focus had moved the Australian branch of the Spartacist League, a highly sectarian orthodox Trotskyist group that had grown from the US and UK in the late 1970s. A memo from June 1980 commented that the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand were ‘active in two main groups… the Gay Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement as a whole, not in individual groups within the movements’, with the Women’s Action Committee identified as the group that the Spartacists were ‘specifically interested in’.[30] In one document from 1980, ASIO outlined the strategy of the Spartacists to acquire members, remarking ‘[i]t is a very long slow process but they gradually draw people away from groups like Gay Liberation and Women’s Rights’.[31] However a document from 1977 had already noted that the Women’s Liberation Movement had already expelled a number of Spartacist League members.[32]

From ‘Australian Spartacist’, May 1980.

The current batch of files run out in 1980, but the last file of the series demonstrates that ASIO’s interest in the Women’s Liberation Movement had greatly waned by the late 1970s. Over the preceding decade, the movement had moved from the extra-parliamentary sphere to the heart of parliamentary politics and policy, as evidenced, for example, by the appointment of Elizabeth Reid as the first Advisor on Women’s Affairs by Gough Whitlam in 1973. The role that the far left played in Australian politics had also waned after the upturn in radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We know that surveillance of the far left and other social movements continued into the 1980s, but the files relating to the Women’s Liberation Movement do not continue into Hawke era.

[1] Greg Langley, A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Homefront, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992).

[6] Andrew Moore, ‘“A Secret Policeman’s Lot”: The Working Life of Fred Longbottom of the New South Wales Special Branch’, in John Shields (ed), All Our Labours:Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (Kensington: UNSW Press, 1992) pp. 193-226; Mark Finnane, ‘Long Gone, But Not Forgotten’, Griffith Review, 21 (2008) https://griffithreview.com/articles/long-gone-but-not-forgotten/ (accessed 7 March 2017).

No amount of statutory power will make it feasible for police forces to take on crowds of thousands on a regular basis. We cannot have another drain on police resources equivalent to policing football matches.[1]

While this Bill was still in development, the Hillsborough disaster occurred and the Bill was temporarily shelved, although as the Hillsborough Independent Panel has shown, the Prime Minister and some of her colleagues wanted to press ahead with pushing the Bill through parliament, despite the need for an investigation into the disaster.[2]

Justice Taylor was assigned to investigate what happened that day, but only a month after the disaster, sections of the Thatcher government were commenting that ‘there was considerable disagreement over the cause of the disaster’.[3] For the government, the reason for the disaster was hooliganism and unruly crowd behaviour. The riots at St Andrews and Luton Town and the Heysel disaster in 1985, as well as clashes between Scottish and English fans in May 1989, had convinced the government that the number one problem at football grounds concerning public order was hooliganism. The Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley complained:

On May 13, less than a month after Hillsborough, there was a serious pitch invasion at Crystal Palace which resulted in 26 arrests. 16 people were injured, two of them with stab wounds. Serious incidents took place all over the country that weekend with more than 300 people being arrested, inside and outside grounds… The existing powers under the Public Order Act have clearly not stamped out the problem.[4]

Speaking at the Football Writers’ Association Dinner in May 1989, the Sports Minister Colin Moynihan spoke dismissively of ‘supporters having to be herded into grounds and protected every match day for their own safety by 5,000 or more police.’[5] The Minister lamented that the police could only ‘contain the problem’ and ‘could be far better deployed in the local communities and towns upholding law and order.’[6]

Another document reiterated this point, stating:

In spite of the efforts of the Government and the football authorities, over 5,000 police officers are still needed every Saturday to contain the problem, to protect the true supporters and those living near football grounds.[7]

The file shows that the government felt that it had to take action, and that the football authorities could not be relied upon to ensure public order at football grounds. At his after dinner speech to the Football Writers’ Association, Moynihan announced:

The Government is not going to allow hooligans to run the show if the football authorities cannot do it themselves.[8]

Although they believed that the final report of the Taylor Inquiry was ‘flawed’,[9] Home Secretary David Waddington wrote to Margaret Thatcher in January 1990 that they should take advantage of the report’s condemnation of the Football League. Waddington noted that the report:

places the responsibility for complacency about safety, for decline in the conditions of grounds, and for poor facilities for spectators firmly at the door of the football industry. It suggests in effect that if you treat people like animals, they will behave that way.[10]

Even though one could say that the Thatcher government held similar perceptions about football crowds in the 1980s, the government tried to portray itself as ‘cleaning up’ English football and taking responsibility after the ineffective management of the football authorities. Moynihan wrote to the editor of The Times, in response to an editorial in the newspaper, outlining the actions of the government to combat hooliganism, especially as the press highlighted fears about English fans at the World Cup being held in Italy during the summer. Defending the government’s record, Moynihan wrote:

This is a record of action not apathy but the Government cannot cure all of football’s problems for it. The essential message of Lord Justice Taylor’s Report is that football must at last face up to its own responsibilities.[11]

The final report of the Taylor Report warned against the implementation of the membership scheme set out in the Football Supporters Bill (and pushed for by the Association of Chief Police Officers), concluding:

I therefore have grave doubts whether the scheme will achieve its object of eliminating hooligans from inside the ground. I have even stronger doubts as to whether it will achieve its further object of ending football hooliganism outside grounds. Indeed, I do not think it will. I feat that, in the short term at least, it may actually increase trouble outside grounds.[12]

With the release of this report, the government decided to drop the push for implementation of the membership scheme, but the Football Supporters Bill was finally passed in November 1989. The Act, in practice, focused much more criminal sanctions against suspected, as well as convicted, ‘hooligans’, and ensuring that football grounds were considered ‘safe’ for top flight matches. For the Thatcher government in the wake of Hillsborough, the focus was on crowd control and dealing with unruly elements of football crowds. The actions of the police, at this point in time, were never questioned by the government.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the phenomenon of acid house swept across the UK in the mid-to-late 1980s and while a number of clubs, such as the Hacienda in Manchester and Shoom in London, attracted large crowds for their club nights, raves exploded into open areas that were typical venues – warehouses, fields and other places left vacant by Thatcherism. For a number of reasons, including the noise generated by these parties and the use of drugs, these raves started to draw the ire of the police and of the authorities. One briefing note stated that the ‘main problem with acid house parties is the nuisance caused by the noise’ and curiously, stressed ‘[d]rugs are not the main issue’.[1] In a letter to the Leader of the House of Commons, Sir Geoffrey Howe, the new Home Secretary David Waddington wrote that there was also a concern that ‘criminal elements [were] becoming involved’.[2] This concern, ‘coupled with the need to reassure the public that the existing law can be made effective’, Waddington argued, required a new approach.[3] He also noted that 223 parties had been held in London and the South East in 1989, with 96 stopped by the police and another 95 prevented from going ahead.[4]

And so, after a localised and haphazard response by local councils and the police, in late 1989, the Thatcher government proposed a co-ordinated and nationwide effort to clamp down on these ‘illegal’ parties. The aforementioned briefing note outlined that there were four ways to combat these parties:

Under the licensing law that governs public entertainment;

Under Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986;

Under the common law powers available to the police to prevent public disturbances;

The note stated that all indoor events were subject to licensing laws (particularly the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982), irrespective of venue, and that in some cases, outdoor events were also subject to licensing laws, depending on the local authorities. However the largest problem for regulating raves through this mechanism, operated by the local councils, was that ‘most organisers of acid house parties are flouting the law by not applying for a licence’.[6] A report produced by the Association of District Councils explained the authorities had tried to prosecute party organisers under the 1982 Act in the past, but there were many ‘practical difficulties’ with the legislation.[7] This report suggested that a ‘national code of standard conditions’ be drawn up, similar to the code of practice for music events that had previously been established by the Greater London Council.[8] Interestingly the same document also mentioned that it might be pertinent to take into account the recent report by Lord Justice Taylor into the Hillsborough Disaster.[9]

All involved in this discussion felt that one of the key reasons that the organisers did not seek to obtain licenses for their events was that the penalty was far too low – a £2000 fine and/or up to 3 months in prison. In his letter to Howe, Waddington wrote that the penalties were ‘so relatively light that the organisers of these very profitable acid house parties can afford to ignore the law’.[10] Waddington proposed fines be raised to £20,000 and a possibility of up to 6 months imprisonment, commenting that the Association of Chief Police Officers supported these stricter penalties.[11]

One of the problems facing the authorities was that because these raves could be held in any kind of space, trying to police them was difficult. As mentioned above, indoor events were subject to licensing laws, but outdoor events weren’t always covered. For the police, indoor gatherings were not specifically within their remit, but outside assemblies were, under the Public Order Act 1986. An extension of the Public Order Act to include indoor assemblies was considered ‘contentious’[12] and at this stage, looked like legislative overkill (although similar legislation was eventually passed in 1994 to combat outdoor raves with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act).

In a letter from Home Office official Peter Storr to Margaret Thatcher’s Personal Secretary Andrew Turnbull, he noted that the police were ‘generally relying on their common law powers to prevent a breach of peace’ and that in the past, the police had ‘been able to persuade organisers to pack up voluntarily’.[13] Furthermore, they had ‘on occasion seized sound equipment on the grounds of preventing a breach of the peace’.[14] The aforementioned briefing note acknowledged:

Strictly speaking the police have no power to intervene to stop a party purely on grounds of noise. But if they receive complaints about the noise, they can intervene using common law powers.[15]

However it was argued that the police were often reluctant to intervene in this way, due to the following two reasons:

mainly to the sheer numbers involved in some of the parties – the risk would be too great;

slight nervousness about relying on common law powers alone – this leaves them open to challenge.[16]

It was believed that what was required were greater police powers ‘to act in flagrant cases’ immediately and at the time of night when these parties were occurring. Turnbull wrote to Carolyn Sinclair in the Home Office saying, ‘It will not be sufficient to give local authorities extra powers if they are not around at 3am to enforce [licensing laws]’.[17] The Association of District Councils also called for the police to be given greater powers ‘to seize and remove and apparatus or equipment’ being used by party organisers.[18]

While the primary problem with acid house parties was identified as the public nuisance caused by the excessive noise generated by these parties, the legislation dealing with noise pollution, the Control of Pollution Act 1974 was deemed ‘inadequate to deal with these parties’.[19] It was noted that noise nuisance was a civil offence and the legislation was aimed at factories and other industrial sites, rather than outdoor events. Thus ‘remedy through the courts [was] slow’.[20] The Department of Environment pushed to make noise nuisance a criminal offence,[21] but Turnbull advised the Home Office that Thatcher was ‘doubtful whether greater use of the Control of Pollution Act would be effective as the need was for action at short notice outside working hours.’[22]

Alongside greater penalties under the licensing laws and more explicit powers to allow the police to break ‘illegal’ raves, one of the key proposals made by the Home Office and other agencies was to establish powers to seize profits from party organisers. Powers to seize the proceeds of crime already existed under schedule 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (with a minimum of £10,000 to be confiscated after conviction), and Waddington suggested to Howe that this legislation could be easily amended to incorporate the organisation of these parties into the legislation.[23] On this point, the Home Office’s briefing note stated:

What is needed is a way of hitting at the profit made by the organisers. This should discourage the craze.[24]

It was hoped that these increased penalties and powers of confiscation, as well as more pre-emptive action between the police and local councils, would prevent acid house parties from occurring. The Home Office noted:

No amount of statutory power will make it feasible for police forces to take on crowds of thousands on a regular basis. We cannot have another drain on police resources equivalent to policing football matches.[25]

Incidentally, this was the argument made by Tony Wilson in the final days of the Hacienda – that the police were willing to police Manchester United and Manchester City games, but unwilling to do the same at the famous nightclub to ensure people’s safety.

The following year the Thatcher government passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act, which increased the penalties for organising an ‘illegal’ party to £20,000 and/or 6 months in prison. As the debate in Hansard shows, these measures were supported by both major parties in the House of Commons. The Criminal Justice Act 1988 was also amended to allow the seizure of profits made by party organisers.

However this did not end the phenomenon of the illegal rave and the Major government introduced the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to deal specifically with raves, which included the seizure of equipment used to put on events deemed illegal. This Act was opposed by many and led to a grassroots resistance by partygoers and activists. But this was a far way off in 1989. We will have to wait a few more years for the internal government records relating to this.

To Guardian journalist Simon Jenkins, just over thirty years ago is too far into the past for an inquiry into the events at Orgreave in June 1984, when the police reacted violently to striking workers in South Yorkshire and led to the arrest of 95 miners, as well as a number of people injured. Jenkins argues that “we know” what happened at Orgreave on that day, and that it should be left in the past – even though no one in a position of authority has been held accountable for excessive force used by the police against the striking miners. Anyway ‘[t]here were no deaths at Orgreave’, he says, so an inquiry, like those held into Bloody Sunday or Hillsborough, is unnecessary. But this assumes that the only reason to have an inquiry into police actions is when there is a death involved – isn’t the likelihood of excessive force being used by the police en masse enough of an issue to warrant further investigation?

Jenkins is right in that government inquiries often don’t led to any significant reform or ‘lessons learned’. Even the stand out inquiries of Lord Scarman into the Brixton Riots of 1981 and the 1999 Macpherson Inquiry into the Investigation into the Death of Stephen Lawrence have been criticised for their limited impact upon the policing of ethnic minority communities in the UK (especially in the wake of the 2011 riots). But most inquiries held are short term affairs, announced by the government of the day to placate public opinion and often to appear to be ‘doing something’. A swathe of criminological and public policy scholarship has proposed that public inquiries are foremost exercises in the management of public opinion, rather than missions to find the ‘truth’ behind an incident or to determine accountability. Between the Scarman Inquiry into the Events at Red Lion Square in 1974 and the Macpherson Inquiry in 1998-99, there have been numerous inquiries into the actions of the police (and other government agencies) that have resulted in disorder, injuries and even death. Besides the Scarman Report in 1981 and the Macpherson Report almost 20 years later, most inquiries have left little mark on police practice. There are a number of incidents involving the death of people involved in interactions with the police, such as that of Blair Peach in 1979 and Ian Tomlinson in 2009, where there has been a coronial inquest, but no wider inquiry, even though people have demanded it.

But an inquiry into Orgreave is likely to be much more far-reaching than those held immediately after the fact, similar to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday or the Hillsborough Independent Panel. These inquiries were held after the initial inquiries, the Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday in 1972 and Taylor Report into Hillsborough in 1989-90, were seen to be deficient by subsequent governments. Both of these inquiries were held over years, rather than weeks or months, and had legislation specifically introduced to open many documents that had previously been classified. In the end, these inquiries identified those who should be (or should have been) held accountable for these tragic events and delivered some form of justice to the relatives of the victims. Jenkins suggests that these were merely costly exercises in legal navel-gazing and that the cost of both inquiries could have been better spent on been given to the relatives of the victims and/or to their communities. However what had driven those pushing for the events at both Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough to be re-examined was not compensation, but for those responsible to identified and where possible, held accountable in some way.

This is the purpose of a proposed inquiry into the events at Orgreave on 18 June 1984. Opposite to Jenkins’ argument, we don’t know the full story of what happened on that day. We have footage, we have witness testimony and the paperwork of those who were dragged through the courts, but we don’t have the police side of the story (or at least the full story). Despite thirty years since the event passing, no documents relating to Orgreave have been made open by the National Archives at Kew and the police have refused several previous FOI requests. Like the documents examined by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, all police and government papers relating to the events at Orgreave should be released to an inquiry and at the completion of said inquiry, these documents (with the necessary redactions) should be digitised and made available for public viewing.

Jenkins equates a possible inquiry with Tony Blair’s apologies for the slave trade and the Irish Famine, but this is false. The ‘Battle of Orgreave’ happened within the lifetimes for many of us, not 150-200 years ago. Orgreave is not merely history, but an important historical incident that needs to be fully investigated. Let’s hope that enough pressure is put upon Amber Rudd (or her successor) to reverse the decision for an inquiry not to be held.

In the UK border control system, there is a high level of suspicion inherent, with border control practices often starting from the assumption that migrants, visitors and those seeking asylum are attempting to evade or deceive the system. The default thinking of the border control system seems to assume that certain migrant groups are not who they say they are when interacting with the system. As Marmo and Smith (2010a; 2010b) have argued, there has been a long-standing belief in the UK border control system that migrants and asylum seekers, particularly from Asia and Africa, are potentially ‘bogus’ migrants, with constant mention by the authorities about the unreliability of the testimony of migrants and asylum seekers from these parts of the world, as well as a suspicion that documentary evidence provided by these migrants is likely to be fake. The authorities claim to weigh up decisions ‘on balance of probabilities’, but it is often the case that the border control staff begin from a point of total disbelief and shift the burden of proof onto the person applying to enter the country. With this burden of proof placed upon the individual, it is often difficult to persuade the authorities that their reasons to enter the country, as a visitor, a working migrant, a migrating family member or even as a refugee, is genuine, which is made more difficult by the presumption that testimony and documentary evidence provided by certain migrant groups is likely to be falsified. Under the intense scrutiny of the border control authorities, if testimony and documents are not considered to be convincing enough, the focus of the authorities may shift to physical examination, with the body becoming the marker of ‘truth’. As Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Hallunin (2005: 598) wrote about refugees in the French border control system, ‘their word is systematically doubted [and] it is their bodies that are questioned’.

This post examines one particular way in which the body is questioned by the border control system – the use of x-rays for age assessment. The use of x-rays for this purpose is a non-medical use of the technology and is used solely for the administration of the border control system in an attempt to determine whether a person intercepted by the system is telling ‘the truth’ or not. This post will look at how x-rays were used in the UK border control system in the past and the continued debate about whether to reintroduce the practice for border control purposes, particular the decision by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to trial the use of dental x-rays for age assessment in 2012. Within the UK border control system, the authorities have relied on the use of x-rays in an attempt to extract ‘the truth’ from people whose testimony and documentary evidence is not believed, despite the ethical concerns raised in using medical technology for non-medical purposes and criticisms that x-rays are not satisfactory tools for assessing age.

The use of x-rays in the 1970s

In the UK context, x-rays were used in controlling immigration from South Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. By this time, the largest number of migrants entering the UK was from the Indian subcontinent in the form of family reconciliation. Many young men came to the UK from South Asia in the 1950s and early 1960s before the introduction of immigration controls and with a decline in labour migration from this region in the early 1970s, the majority of migrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were the families of the young men who had arrived in the UK in the decades before. Several pieces of legislation had been introduced between 1962 and 1971 to limit mass migration from the British Commonwealth, but the Immigration Act 1971 still allowed the wives and children (under the age of 18) to join their family members already residing in the UK. With the significant number of migrants applying to enter UK under the guise of family reconciliation, particularly as children aged under 18, the UK authorities thought that this was a loophole that could be exploited, often as documentation regarding children was less substantial than an adult (for example, children often did not have their own passports and were simply listed on an adult’s passport). The UK border control staff were especially concerned about teenage male migrants, who, if they were over the age of 18, would not be allowed to enter the UK and who were the least ‘desirable’ (due to their labour capacity) in 1970s Britain. To determine whether teenagers were falsely claiming to be under 18 for migration purposes, the UK border control system, particularly at the British High Commissions in South Asia where applications for entry clearance certificates were first assessed, used x-rays of the wrists of individuals to estimate the skeletal age of the applicant.

Although the practice had occurred for most of the 1970s, it was not until The Guardian published details of gynaecological examinations being conducted on migrating South Asian women in early 1979 that the practice became widely known. At the height of the ‘virginity testing’ controversy in February 1979 (see Smith and Marmo 2011), details also emerged that x-rays were being taken of women and children to ascertain the age of suspected ‘bogus’ migrants, as well as for supposed communicable diseases. It was claimed in The Guardian that these x-rays were being conducted by unqualified immigration officers at Heathrow, as well as at High Commissions abroad, which ‘expose[d] both the passengers and clerks to considerable radiation hazards’ (The Guardian, 9 Feb, 1979: 1). The Guardian (8 Feb, 1979: 1) also reported that at the British High Commission in Dacca, a pregnant woman had her skull x-rayed, ‘despite the fact that Department of Health regulations would prevent such a test on pregnant British women’. A possible indication that the British Government held strict immigration control as a primary concern, rather than providing humanitarian approach to potential migrants, was in the response to these allegations by Eric Deakins, a junior Department of Health Minister, who said that ‘immigration screening cannot be measured against [domestic] NHS standards’ (The Guardian, 9 Feb, 1979: 1). Like the virginity ‘tests’, the veracity and usefulness of these examinations was questioned, with Labour MP Jo Richardson stating, ‘medical opinion… is beginning to query the practice. It is beginning to say that it is an unreliable method of determining age’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 19 Feb, 1979: 216). In response to the questions surrounding the use of x-rays in immigration control, the Labour Government acquiesced somewhat in the face of mounting criticism and Rees announced the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Henry Yellowlees would ‘carry out a review of the objects and nature of all medical examinations in the immigration control context’ (Cited in, Juss 1997: 109).

However there were many who felt that an internal investigation to be conducted by Yellowlees seemed to be an attempt to stem further discussion of the subject and to deflect further criticism of the Government in the lead up to the 1979 General Election. Various critics, from Jo Richardson in Parliament and from the editorial pages of The Guardian in particular, condemned the lack of transparency in the Government’s immigration control procedures. Ms Richardson declared in Parliament, that it was ‘high time that the secret instructions given by the Home Secretary to immigration officers under the immigration legislation were made public’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 19 Feb, 1979: 217). The treatment of legitimate migrants and the scrutiny placed upon one’s application to enter Britain was heavily determined by the discretion of individual Entry Clearance Officers, but the manner in which these discretionary powers manifested were open to any kind of evaluation by anyone outside the border control system. An editorial in The Guardian (10 Feb, 1979: 8) criticised the extent of the discretionary powers of ECOs and the lack of transparency in the application of such powers:

The central issue thrown up by the variety of medical tests remains that of discretion and its monitoring… When the virginity tests first came to light, we said that investigation of a particular case was not enough and that a full debate on immigration procedures was needed… But it cannot begin until the full codes of guidance for immigration officers and their medical colleagues as well, are published and the scope of their practices is clearly and publicly disclosed.

This frustration with the internal inquiry being conducted by Henry Yellowlees led to the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) to propose an independent investigation into discrimination within immigration control, which lasted from 1981 to 1985. The inquiry performed by Yellowlees and his assistant, Dr N.J.B. Evans, on the other hand, was undertaken during 1979-1980, with the final report released to Parliament in April 1980.

Evans travelled to South Asia in 1980 to investigate the broad topic of medical examination within the immigration control system and with his fieldwork, much of the final report was written by him. A draft version of the Yellowlees report (1980a: appendix 1, 2) stated, according to ‘orthodox radiological opinion in the UK and overseas’, it was ‘acceptable to use such bone X-rays to assist in estimating the age of children’, while the final report concluded that x-rays were ‘a potentially more accurate method of estimating the age of children’ than other examinations of the body, such as ‘skin texture, wrinkling or firmness of tissues, and of noting indications of puberty’ (Yellowlees, 1980b: appendix 1, 1-2). Based on North American studies, the report claimed that ‘[t]he accuracy attainable is in the order of plus or minus six months and the radiation exposure negligible’ and while noting that tables of skeleton maturity were based on North American children and there is ‘very little firm data’ on how these tables compared with the skeletons of children from South Asia, the report argued that it was assumed that skeletons matured earlier in South Asian children and were thus still useful (Yellowlees, 1980b: appendix 1, 2). The major finding of the report regarding the use of x-rays for age assessment purposes was:

I conclude that the use of X-rays of the bony skeleton provides a useful, fairly accurate and acceptable safe way of estimating age of children when it is important to do so. (Children in this context means up to about 21 years…) Only one or two X-ray pictures need be taken, of the upper limb or the lower limb excluding the hips. Provided proper shielding is used in accordance with normal radiological practice, the radiation dose to the parts X-rayed is minimal and the scattered gonadal dose is insignificant. These views accord with informed radiological opinion in the UK and overseas (Yellowlees, 1980b: appendix 1, 3).

The report also concluded that ‘United Kingdom radiological opinion holds that X-rays are not particularly useful for estimating the age of adults’, but acknowledged that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had instructed Entry Clearance Officers in October 1979 that x-rays should not be administered on anyone thought to be over 21 years of age (Yellowlees, 1980b: appendix 1, 3-4).

Despite the Yellowlees Report recommending that the border control system continue to use x-rays to assess the age of migrants thought to be under 21 years of age, several other people and organisations criticised this viewpoint. At the AGM of the British Medical Association in 1979, a resolution was passed that stated that ‘radiological examinations, carried out solely for administrative and political purposes, are unethical’ and proposed that the BMA ‘make the strongest possible representation to the Government to ban these practices’ (cited in, Gordon, 1983: 15). A report prepared by Edward White for Lord Avebury, a Liberal member of the House of Lords, cited the past chair of the National Council of Radiation Protection as warning against unnecessary x-rays and claiming that ‘there is no safe level of exposure’ (cited in, Gordon, 1983: 15). White also questioned accuracy of age assessment through the use of x-rays, particularly in relation to the use of generalised data on age/bone ratio based on North American children to assess South Asian children, and concluded:

After a thorough and objective examination of the practice, one must conclude that radiological examinations are a highly inaccurate method of determining chronological age (cited in, Gordon, 1983: 16).

As mentioned before, the Yellowlees Report sidestepped the issue of data on the skeletal maturity of South Asian children and recommended that further research in this area was required. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (1981: 13) stated that the report’s findings on x-rays ‘managed to contradict itself and most accepted medical opinion regarding the reliability of such assessment’. However in FCO briefing notes for answering press questions on the report, it stated that the Home Secretary was ‘not aware that the balance of informed medical opinion is against such tests’ (FCO 1980a: 2) and the government persisted with the claim that x-rays for age assessment purposes was both useful and relatively safe (for example, FCO 1980b).

So the x-raying of children continued throughout 1980 and 1981. In January 1981, the Foreign Minister Lord Carrington stated in the House of Lords that in the last nine months of 1980, around 360 children under 21 had been x-rayed in Dacca and around another 300 in Islamabad (House of Lords, Hansard, 19 Jan, 1981: 336w). The following January, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the FCO, David Trefgarne, announced in the House of Lords that during 1981, approximately 420 children had been x-rayed Islamabad and 262 children in Dacca (House of Lords, Hansard, 28 Jan, 1982: 1114w).

However the following month, the Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw announced that the FCO would no longer be carrying out x-rays on children for these purposes. Whitelaw stated in parliament that Yellowlees had revised his opinion since the report was released in 1980 and advised the Home Secretary that x-rays were now ‘unlikely to provide more accurate evidence of age than the assessment of other physical characteristics of an individual, and therefore can add little to the general clinical examination’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 22 Feb, 1982: 279-280w). The Runnymede Trust archive at the Black Cultural Archives in London has a copy of the letter that Yellowlees wrote to Whitelaw, which concluded that ‘the usefulness of the X-ray method of estimating age must be limited in the immigration context’ (Yellowlees, 1982: 2). Yellowlees maintained that the x-rays were relatively safe, but chiefly found that using the template of the skeletal maturity of North American or European children to assess the age of South Asian children was insufficient to make an accurate assessment of age. Yellowlees (1982: 2) stated ‘the scientific foundation for this when applied – for example – Asian children must be open to doubt’. Whitelaw said that Yellowlees had ‘concluded that such X-ray examinations are of limited value and their continued use in the immigration context can no longer be justified’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 22 Feb, 1982: 279-280w). In its report, the CRE (1985: 40) argued that since the government acknowledged that x-rays were not satisfactorily reliable for estimating age, ‘it should attempt to review previous cases where such evidence was a substantial factor leading to refusal’, but this recommendation was not enacted by the government. In a document outlining the government’s response to the CRE report, held in the Runnymede Trust archive, stated that it was ‘not feasible’ to review all of these cases ‘given the immense amount of work it would involve’ (Home Office, 1985: 12).

The UKBA trial and its critiques

Since Whitelaw’s decision to end the use of x-rays for the assessment of age in migrant children, the topic has been referred to from time to time by parliamentarians. For example, in the House of Lords debate on the Asylum and Immigration Bill 1996, Lord Avebury sought to insert an amendment which would effectively ban the use of x-rays for the assessment of age, but was rebuffed by Lord David Renton who said that, ‘[i]t is difficult for the immigration officers, medical people, or anyone to say what those people’s ages really are. If the X-ray can decide the matter, we should keep an open mind on the issue’ (House of Lords, Hansard, 20 Jun, 1996: 562-563). Aynsley-Green, et. al. (2012: 102) has shown the matter was brought up again in 2006 and 2009, and most recently has been revived by the UKBA in early 2012.

In March 2012, Zilla Bowell, the Director of Asylum for the UKBA, wrote in a letter, reproduced on the website of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, to various stakeholders announcing that there would be a three month trial of using dental x-rays to determine the age of asylum applicants. The letter said that many would ‘be aware of the difficulties that arise when we are not able to establish, with any certainty, the age of an asylum applicant’ and that the UKBA were ‘keen to utilise any appropriate tool which can increase our levels of certainty (as long as it does not have a negative impact on the individual in safeguarding terms, of course)’ (Bowell, 2012a). The trial was aimed at people assessed as adults, ‘but who continue to contend that they are children’ and the UKBA argued that ‘participation in the pilot is completely voluntary’ (Bowell 2012a).

However this proposed trail received significant criticism from immigration lawyers, medical and dental professionals and the four UK children’s commissioners, who were quoted in The Guardian (30 Mar, 2012) as claiming the proposed actions were ‘a clear breach of the rights of vulnerable children and young people and may, in fact, be illegal’. While talking to some stakeholders, Damien Green, the Conservative Minister for Immigration, admitted in parliament that the UKBA had not discussed the trial with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but had ‘sought legal advice on the legality of the trial’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 30 Apr, 2012: 1081w). A month later, Bowell sent another letter announcing that the proposed trail was being halted, after the Chief Medical officer suggested that the UKBA discuss the trial with the National Research Ethics Service (NRES). According to Bowell (2012b), the NRES ‘concluded that our proposed trail constitutes “research” and that, as such, it requires the approval of a research committee before it can proceed’. Bowell (2012b) argued that this was ‘contrary to their expectations’, explaining that the view of the UKBA was that ‘the trial did not constitute “research” and ethical approval was not therefore necessary’. The Guardian (27 Apr, 2012) called this ‘a profound embarrassment for the Home Office’ and claimed that the Home Office had refused for a month to publicly reveal whether the agency had ever sought ethical permission for the programme’. Both Bowell (2012b) and the Minister for Families, Sarah Teather, said that no x-rays had yet taken place (House of Commons, Hansard, 30 Apr, 2012: 1236w), and the UKBA were looking into whether to proceed with the trial in the future.

With the possibility of the trial still going ahead in the future, the British Medical Bulletin published an article on the various issues surrounding the assessment of age of young people in immigration control, which declared that ‘age assessment practice in the UK remains highly inconsistent’ and was therefore unreliable for border control purposes (Aynsley-Green, et. al., 2012: 23). The authors listed five main reasons for opposing the use of x-rays to assess the age of young people:

Firstly, the authors pointed out that x-rays of bones or teeth ‘can never indicate precisely the chronological age of the individual’ and at best could provide an estimate of skeletal/dental maturity compared to an average control subject (Aynsley-Green, al., 2012: 24). Further to this, as x-rays for age assessment were most likely to be used to establish whether a young person was over the age of 18 or not, the authors acknowledged that the most salient group affected by this practice would be young persons between the ages of around 15 to 20 years old and in the article. However, the authors stated, ‘there is no “scientific method” that can provide a precise assessment of chronological age in individuals between 15 and 20 years of age’ (Aynsley-Green, et. al., 2012: 27).

Secondly, the authors noted, which the Yellowlees report had sidestepped in 1981, that ‘standards of normality’ in regards to age assessment using physical characteristics are ‘simply not available for children and young people from many countries in Asia, Africa or the Middle East’, with the authors further stating that it would ‘unsatisfactory to assess their images from the standards derived from Caucasian, European or North American children’ (Aynsley-Green, al., 2012: 24).

Thirdly, the authors simply state ‘although superficially easy to do, radiography demands expert interpretation by experienced paediatricians, dentists or radiologists’ (Aynsley-Green, al., 2012: 24). What the authors seem to be implying with this statement is in the border control context, x-rays for age assessment might be utilised by border control staff, rather than medical professionals. This was also a concern in 1979 when the controversy over x-rays first emerged.

Fourthly, the authors point out that x-rays give a dose of radiation and that the non-medical use of x-rays is not safe or ethical on these grounds, stating that the x-rays are ‘driven solely by a government’s administrative convenience and is without therapeutic benefit to the individual’ (Aynsley-Green, al., 2012: 24).

Lastly, the authors propose that all medical procedures should only be conducted with fully informed consent of the individual, but ‘[i]n the immigration context, ensuring that full and informed consent is obtained is complicated by cultural, religious and linguistic factors, often coupled with a general lack of understanding of medical environments’ (Aynsley-Green, al., 2012: 25). Also in the border control context, if a medical procedure is to be used as evidence where the burden of proof falls on the applicant, then the applicant has no choice but to consent or else their application will probably be unsuccessful. This can no longer be considered consent.

As well as listing these concerns, the authors mentioned a number of medical and dental bodies that opposed the use of x-rays for age assessment purposes, stating that growing concern that this use of x-rays was ‘imprecise, unethical and potentially unlawful has led every relevant statutory and professional body in the UK to argue against its use’ (Aynsley-Green, et. al., 2012: 25).

Does the border control system lack institutional memory?

The fact that the UKBA has not completely shelved the idea of using x-rays for age assessment purposes shows two things. Firstly, it shows that the border control system maintains the idea of shifting the burden of proof onto the individual applicant and that physical examination is necessary as the applicant is inherently untrustworthy. Secondly, it shows that while this idea has a long history within the border control system, it also shows that the institutional memory of the system is not as far-reaching in other areas as it attempts to recycle ideas that were dismissed as unsatisfactory thirty years ago. As long as the emphasis of the border control system lies in attempting to maintain the ‘secure’ border and the idea of the border as separating the domestic British population from the threat of migrant ‘other’ is still fostered, there will be strict scrutiny placed upon those who attempt to traverse through the system. In this world, the applicant must prostrate themselves to the interrogations of the system and all available avenues are explored to satisfy the administration of a ‘firm’ border control system. Lord Renton’s quote on keeping an ‘open mind’ on the matter of using x-rays, despite the criticisms, for immigration purposes highlights this. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants wrote in 1985:

entry clearance procedures abroad are operated on the assumption that they need to be directed towards the detection of bogus applicants even if in the process genuine applicants are refused. This licenses entry clearance officers to behave like a fraud squad, rather than as neutral officials processing applications from the wives and children of British and settled men (JCWI, 1985: 2).

Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (1985) ‘Briefing on Immigration Control Procedures: Report of a Formal Investigation by the Commission for Racial Equality’, RC/RF/1/01/B, Runnymede Trust archive, BCA

Juss, S (1997) Discretion and Deviation in the Administration of Immigration Control (Sweet & Maxwell, London)